{"id":470839,"date":"2026-09-21T13:36:10","date_gmt":"2026-09-21T13:36:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/470839\/"},"modified":"2026-09-21T13:36:10","modified_gmt":"2026-09-21T13:36:10","slug":"scott-wiener-was-right-about-ai-all-along","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/470839\/","title":{"rendered":"Scott Wiener was right about AI all along"},"content":{"rendered":"

I got a call the other evening from the (opens in new tab)<\/a>Connie Chan for Congress (opens in new tab)<\/a> campaign. The volunteer wanted to know if they could count on my vote.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t fault Chan\u2019s campaign for not having matched my name with the person <\/a>who wrote in May<\/a> that there was little in the background of Chan, the District 1 supervisor, \u201cto suggest a passion for national policy\u201d or that state Sen. Scott Wiener, Chan\u2019s opponent in the race to succeed Rep. Nancy Pelosi, \u201chas earned the right to represent us in the House.\u201d<\/p>\n

Admirably on script, Chan\u2019s campaign aide told me that Connie is for working people, while Scott is a \u201ccorporate Democrat.\u201d I couldn\u2019t help but blurt out: \u201cI\u2019m a corporate Democrat!\u201d With that, we amicably thanked each other and said goodbye.<\/p>\n

It is amusing that Chan is positioning Wiener as a toady of business interests, particularly Big Tech. The entire country is freaking out (opens in new tab)<\/a>over artificial intelligence right now. Trumpists, sane Republicans, establishment Democrats, and AI CEOs are among the chief freaker-outers. Wiener, it\u2019s worth recalling, was ahead of all of them on this critical issue.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Wiener started raising the alarm about AI\u2019s horrific potential three years ago. When he passed one of the first AI bills (opens in new tab)<\/a> in the country in 2024, everyone who mattered, including tech leaders, Gov. Gavin Newsom, then-Mayor London Breed, and, yes, Pelosi, opposed him. Now it\u2019s obvious that Wiener was right \u2014 right to be prudently concerned about AI, and right to craft sensible, modestly restrictive legislation to mitigate the risks. That\u2019s because he is the kind of serious, forward-thinking, courageous legislator San Francisco needs in Washington. Supportive of business when it matches his political agenda, he nevertheless is no shill for Big Tech.<\/p>\n

And yet, Wiener very well could lose this race if the people who are naturally aligned with him don\u2019t wake up to the fact that he\u2019s in a dogfight with a savvy Chan and the highly motivated Pelosi, who is all but running Chan\u2019s race.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI was being called every name in the book,\u201d Wiener told me last week in an interview at a downtown coffee shop. \u201cDoomer, decel. They said I was perpetuating science fiction and that these risks were not real.\u201d (\u201cDecel\u201d \u2014 I looked it up \u2014 is short for \u201cdecelerationist,\u201d someone who wants to slow the growth of AI, which happens to be what many AI bigwigs are now advocating.) \u201cI am not anti-AI,\u201d said Wiener. \u201cI want it to do good things for humanity. I just don\u2019t want it to harm humanity.\u201d<\/p>\n

True to form, Wiener went about his legislative work methodically, having been prodded by various concerned technologists and policy wonks. He offered a placeholder bill in the state senate in 2023 that served as a policy memo for further discussion. The bill he passed through both houses of the Legislature the following year focused mainly on the biggest AI companies and would have required pre-launch safety standards, \u201ckill-switch\u201d technology, whistleblower protections, and various safety protocols \u2014 all things Congress and the Trump administration are kicking around but have not acted on.<\/p>\n

Wiener told me he was most concerned with catastrophic risk and the possibility that AI would perpetrate \u201call sorts of major crimes and terrorist activity that, if engaged in by a human, would put that person in prison forever.\u201d These include calamities like shutting down the power grid, crippling the banking system, and creating and deploying chemical and biological weapons.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

After his bill passed, the tech industry went ballistic against it and him. The loudest voice was the MAGA-supporting venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which treats AI regulation the same way the NRA approaches gun control and San Francisco\u2019s public-sector unions view layoffs: None of it is welcome. Pelosi vocally opposed the legislation, widely interpreted as a move to undercut Wiener as he mounted a stealthy campaign to run for her seat. Newsom, persuaded that regulation would drive AI companies out of California, vetoed Wiener\u2019s bill. Nothing if not dogged, Wiener came back last year with a stripped-down bill \u2014 no kill switches, for example \u2014 that Newsom signed. (Last week the governor broached calling a special legislative session to amp up the state\u2019s AI regulatory game.)<\/p>\n

Given Wiener\u2019s position ahead of the curve on AI policy, his creation of a chatbot<\/a> to mock Chan this year was particularly stupid. \u201cIt was a mistake,\u201d he said of the shitstorm the stunt unleashed. \u201cWe shouldn\u2019t have done it.\u201d As for Chan\u2019s recent claims that he is in bed with Big Tech \u2014 Anthropic, the most safety-conscious of the AI giants, has contributed to an outside group backing him \u2014 the often robotic politician\u2019s temper flares. \u201cIt\u2019s a lie,\u201d he said, adding: \u201cShe never lifted a finger to do any of this work.\u201d<\/p>\n

The whole subject of Wiener\u2019s friendliness with business is one that begs for only-in-San- Francisco contextualization. He proudly calls himself a progressive, showing off a slide with his 97% rating from the California Labor Federation and 16% rating from the California Chamber of Commerce. Still, as a legislative champion of high-density housing development, he is a hero to real estate developers and other YIMBYs. And in the sense that he is pro-transit and more supportive of cops than some of his political brethren, Wiener rightly is considered a San Francisco moderate.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s only one person running for Congress who is going to do a goddam thing to get us more federal funding for transit in San Francisco,\u201d said a fiery Stephen Sherrill, the most business-friendly member of the Board of Supervisors, last week at a breakfast gathering of moderate-aligned supervisor candidates. \u201cHe\u2019s the one candidate in the race who opposed Prop. D\u201d \u2014 the Overpaid CEO Tax that voters defeated in June \u2014 \u201cand the Billionaire Tax\u201d on the state ballot in November.<\/p>\n

This is all true. And yet I\u2019m increasingly hearing from mods who are so angry with Wiener about his AI bill or his Gaza flip-flop<\/a> or his counterproductive Trump bashing (in contrast to Mayor Daniel Lurie\u2019s masterful handling <\/a>of the easily distractible president) that they\u2019re considering sitting out the congressional race altogether.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Lurie, for reasons of his own, is also a problem for Wiener. In a rerun of Lurie\u2019s silence last year over recalled Supervisor Joel Engardio<\/a>, the mayor appears unlikely to back a candidate with whom he aligns on nearly every policy issue. Lurie prizes collegiality with Chan, who isn\u2019t much of a legislative ally, such as when she pried concessions out of him for his signature rezoning plan last year, then voted against it anyway<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Moderates not voting for Wiener would do well to remember the Bernie Sanders supporters who were too upset with Hillary Clinton to vote for her in 2016, which led to cursing us with Trump the first time around. Simply failing to support Wiener could install Chan in Congress for a generation.<\/p>\n

Wiener isn\u2019t perfect. By national standards, he isn\u2019t even that moderate. But as his AI prescience shows, he\u2019s a thoughtful lawmaker with San Francisco\u2019s best interests in mind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I got a call the other evening from the (opens in new tab)Connie Chan for Congress (opens in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":470840,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[2007,8670,8669,101,103,102,1621,104,106,105],"class_list":["post-470839","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-francisco","tag-ai","tag-connie-chan","tag-nancy-pelosi","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-headlines","tag-san-francisco-news","tag-scott-wiener","tag-sf","tag-sf-headlines","tag-sf-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/470839","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=470839"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/470839\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/470840"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=470839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=470839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=470839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}